Note: 'Vivisection' refers to experiments on live animals & humans. These usually
involve making "animal models" of disease, which do not naturally have
the real disease, but which have artificially created symptoms that are
similar to those of the disease. Be sure to read the article Why Do Pharmaceutical
Drugs Injure & Kill Millions of Humans?

Dr. Beddow Bayly:

"Professor C. Lovatt Evans was reported to have told the British Association
at Glasgow in 1928 that "no doctor can use a stethoscope, feel a pulse,
take a blood pressure, administer a hypodermic, give an anaesthetic or
a transfusion, perform any modern operations or indeed take any steps
in diagnosis, prognosis, or treatment without utilising at every turn
knowledge derived from results of animal experimentation and obtainable
in no other way."

This is a statement fairly typical of the almost incredible nonsense
which pro-vivisectionists have the temerity to "broadcast" in their public
utterances and writings. It seems almost an insult to the reader's intelligence
to assume that it requires an answer. However, let us take the claims
in order:

1. The stethoscope was invented by Flaennec when, in 1819, he
screwed up a roll of paper in order to listen to the chest of a stout
patient.

2. Hua Tu, one of the ablest physicians of all time, lived in China 2,000
years ago and developed a high degree of accuracy in diagnosis by feeling
the radial pulse; he was also a pioneer in abdominal operations
(under anaesthetic drugs), and removed diseased lengths of bowel, suturing
sound portions without infection. He was also versed in the action of
the glands upon the body and practised organotherapy. In this latter connection
it is interesting to recall that Dr. Langdon Brown told the British Medical
Association in 1925 that "the pioneer observations were made at the bedside.
Gull & Ord discovered the functions of the thyroid, when the laboratories
had made no more helpful suggestion than that it was merely helpful to
improve the contour of the neck. Addison was the first to point out the
function of the adrenals, while the role of the pituitary was recognised
clinically from the symptoms of acromegaly."

3. Ability to estimate blood-pressure was gained by a study of
the laws of hydrodynamics. In 1733, experiments upon animals, in which
tubes were inserted into animal's arteries, had been found to be totally
inapplicable to man; they contributed nothing to our knowledge of human
blood-pressure nor to the invention of the apparatus now used to record
it; this was not achieved until many years had elapsed since the futile
and cruel animal experiments were performed.

4. The hypodermic syringe was invented by Charles G. Pravaz, a
surgeon of Lyons, in 1852; in the following year Alexander Wood, of Edinburgh,
used this method for injecting morphia for the relief of neuralgia and
thus paved the way for local anaesthesia. Drugs subsequently invented
for this purpose could obviously only be tested for efficacy upon human
volunteers.

5. Of the respiratoryanaesthetics, chloroform was first
used by James Simpson in 1847; ether by William Morton in 1846, after
experiments upon themselves and friends. Nitrous oxide gas had been suggested
by Sir Humphrey Davy as an anaesthetic in 1800, but it was not until 1844
that it was used during the extraction, by a colleague, of a tooth of
a dentist named Horace Wells.

6. According to the Medical World, May 12, 1939: "The father of spinal
anaesthesia is August Bier, a German doctor who in 1898 injected
a 1 per cent solution of cocaine into his own spinal canal in order to
observe its effects."

7. The new basal anaesthetics, which are applied by rectal injection,
were the direct outcome of clinical observation of the action of avertin,
first used to allay the spasms of whooping-cough. Other drugs of the same
chemical series followed. As the Report of the Royal Commission on Vivisection
(1912) declared: "The discovery of anaesthetics owes nothing to experiments
on animals."

8. The first human blood-transfusion was made by Andre Libavius
in 1594 when, for a large reward, the blood of a young man was passed
into the veins of an older man. Modern technique depends upon a careful
matching of blood-types, and no animal experiments have, or could have,
helped in this essential particular.

9. Animal experiments for surgical skillhave already been shown
to be illegal in this country; abroad, we may sum the matter up in the
words of Dr.A.Desjardins, President of the Society of Surgeons in Paris:
"I have never known a single good operator who has learned anything whatever
from experiments on animals".

10. There is hardly a useful drug in the British Pharmacopoeia which
owes anything to animal experiments. Even the so-called biological
standardisation is so unreliable that efforts are continually being made
to replace it by chemical tests in the few cases in which it is employed.
There is plenty of evidence to show that animal experiments on creatures
differing from man in nearly every particular have been both misleading
and dangerous. Moreover, there is one complete system of medicine, the
Homoeopathic, practised by an increasing number of physicians for over
a hundred years, which is based upon principles that entirely rule out
the validity of animal experiments, all tests of the action of drugs being
made upon human volunteers.

Did space permit, every branch of knowledge utilised by medical practitioners
might similarly be shown to be independent of animal experiments,
but this brief article may fitly be concluded by a quotation from an article
in the Medical World, April 12 1940, in which G.E. Donovan, M.B., B.Ch,BAO,
DPH, declares:

"Instruments like the stethoscope, thermometer, microscope, opthalmoscope,
X-rays, etc. made modern clinical medicine. Take them away and you have
practically nothing left." Yet none of these was discovered, or its use
developed through experiments upon animals.

Similar Articles:

Why Do Pharmaceutical
Drugs Injure & Kill Millions of Humans?Are We the Real "Guinea-pigs"? . . . Medical journals report that pharmaceutical
drugs injure millions and kill hundreds of thousands of people each year. This article
explains how drug companies: i) use flexible unscientific tests to make their products
look "safe"; ii) can then use those flexible tests as a legal defence to avoid punishment.

A History of Western Medicine: From ancient Greece to modern times ... a summary of how human medicine:
i) advanced due to scientific clinical observations of humans; and
ii) was regularly stalled and led astray for millenia due to misleading results from vivisection ... excerpts from a book by the medical historian Hans Ruesch.

Doctors Against Vivisection on Scientific & Medical Grounds (vivisection = animal research, animal experiments, animals testing
on live animals or humans). These doctors explain that vivisection is misleading and very damaging to human medicine. Furthermore, that it is not done for science but for commercial reasons to help insure companies against law suits from humans who are damaged by medical treatment.

Recommended Organisations:

Physicians Committee
for Responsible Medicine: Group of doctors, physicians and
health practitioners promoting good health through real science. http://www.pcrm.org